Nextorage Has Made the Fastest CFexpress Card for Sony Cameras Yet

The Japan-based memory manufacturer Nextorage released the fastest CFexpress Type A card made yet, promising read and write speeds of up to 950 MB/s.

Nextorage released two new CFexpress Type A cards in Japan that leap above the current options on the market with some extremely impressive speeds in support of Sony cameras. Type A cards are typically slower than Type B cards because they have only half the PCIe lanes to work with, but they gain an advantage over their larger brethren in that they are significantly smaller. Sony elected to use the Type A format despite the speed limitations as it allowed them to build a memory card slot that was able to read both SD and CFexpress cards.

Nextorage promises that its new A1 Pro card — available in 40GB, 80GB, 160GB, 320GB, and 640GB capacities — will support read and write speeds of up to 950 MB/s. Beyond that, the company says the cards will deliver sustained write performance of 850 MB/s. To that end, Nextorage has received the Compact Flash Association’s VPG400 rating — that’s the highest rating for memory cards that the organization currently offers and is a critical component of assuring a card’s sustained write performance for the most demanding photo and video capture.

The promised performance makes the Nextorage A1 Pro the fastest CFexpress Type A card on the market, besting Sony’s first-party cards that cap out at 800 MB/s read and 700 MB/s write and even beats out the previous best from Exascend, which do match the 950 MB/s read speeds but fall short at only 850 MB/s write speeds.

For those who find capacity to be more important than sustained performance, Nextorage also announced the A1 SE CFexpress Type A cards which match the 950 MB/s peaks of the A1 Pro but are only VPG200 certified. That’s fast enough to work in any Sony camera, for what it’s worth, but it does only promise 200 MB/s sustained performance.

The Nextorage A1 Pro and A1 SE CFexpress Type A memory cards aren’t available outside of Japan yet (in Japan they hit store shelves on December 16), but since the company sells its other CFexpress cards in North America, expect them to arrive sooner rather than later.

The A1 Pro starts at 11,900 yen for the 40GB option and up to 79,800 for the 640GB option (about $83 and $560). The A1 SE is available in only large capacities of 940GB and 1920GB for 64,990 yen and 99,800 yen, respectively (about $457 and $700).